Variational Quantum Simulation of the Fokker-Planck Equation applied to Quantum Radiation Reaction
arXiv:2411.17517 · doi:10.1017/S0022377825100652
Abstract
Near-future experiments with Petawatt class lasers are expected to produce a high flux of gamma-ray photons and electron-positron pairs through Strong Field Quantum Electrodynamical processes. Simulations of the expected regime of laser-matter interaction are computationally intensive due to the disparity of the spatial and temporal scales and because quantum and classical descriptions need to be accounted for simultaneously (classical for collective effects and quantum for nearly-instantaneous events of hard photon emission and pair creation). A typical configuration for experiments is a scattering of an electron and a laser beam which can be mapped to an equivalent problem with constant magnetic field. We study the stochastic cooling of an electron beam in a strong constant uniform magnetic field, both its particle distribution functions and their energy momenta. We start by obtaining approximate closed-form analytical solutions to the relevant observables. Then, we apply the quantum-hybrid Variational Quantum Imaginary Time Evolution to the Fokker-Planck equation describing this process, and compare against theory and results from Particle-In-Cell simulations and classical Partial Differential Equation solvers, showing good agreement. This work will be useful as a first step towards quantum simulation of plasma physics scenarios where diffusion processes are important, in particular in strong electromagnetic fields.
References in corpus (28)
- Array Programming with NumPy
- Quantum Computing in the NISQ era and beyond
- A variational eigenvalue solver on a quantum processor
- Expressibility and entangling capability of parameterized quantum circuits for hybrid quantum-classical algorithms
- Experimental evidence of radiation reaction in the collision of a high-intensity laser pulse with a laser-wakefield accelerated electron beam
- Experimental signatures of the quantum nature of radiation reaction in the field of an ultra-intense laser
- Variational quantum simulation of general processes
- Conceptual Design Report for the LUXE Experiment
- Time-dependent pair cascades in magnetospheres of neutron stars I. Dynamics of the polar cap cascade with no particle supply from the neutron star surface
- Resource-Efficient Quantum Algorithm for Protein Folding
- Stochasticity effects in quantum radiation reaction
- Plasma Physics of Extreme Astrophysical Environments
- From quantum to classical modelling of radiation reaction: a focus on stochasticity effects
- Quantum radiation reaction in head-on laser-electron beam interaction
- Signatures of quantum effects on radiation reaction in laser -- electron-beam collisions
- Pair cascades in the magnetospheres of strongly-magnetized neutron stars
- Quantum Algorithm for the Vlasov Equation
- Variational quantum simulations of stochastic differential equations
- Quantum Computing for Fusion Energy Science Applications
- A variational quantum algorithm for the Feynman-Kac formula
- High-energy synchrotron flares powered by strongly radiative relativistic magnetic reconnection: 2D and 3D PIC simulations
- Hamiltonian simulation for hyperbolic partial differential equations by scalable quantum circuits
- Radiation reaction cooling as a source of anisotropic momentum distributions with inverted populations
- Plasma physics in strong-field regimes: theories and simulations
- Implementing quantum stochastic differential equations on a quantum computer
- Reaching the high laser intensity by a radiating electron
- Analytical solutions for quantum radiation reaction in high-intensity lasers
- Global constant field approximation for radiation reaction in collision of high-intensity laser pulse with electron beam